We leave the captives in their cages to anticipate their rescue as soon as the 4th boss dies. Then we go back, free them, take their treasure and head to Malacrass.

Curious, for a non-25 man guild progressing well into kara, at what point should we be thinking about stepping into ZA? I've heard it's a strain on tanks and healers. What sort of numbers are we looking at?

If you can't kill Prince, I wouldn't really want to try Zul'aman. The bosses all hit as hard as he does, and only the bear boss is "simpler."

We killed the prince last week for the first time in my alt's guild, and we dropped into ZA last night and got the first boss down. We used 2 druid tanks.

Basically. You really should have Kara on farm, as if you can't kill Prince or Nightbane on a regular basis, you're lacking the gear to sustain a hard hitting boss fight. All the bosses in ZA have more HP than Prince or Nightbane, and hit harder. That means your tanks need to be better geared, your healers need to be able to extend themselves further, and your DPS needs to be able to pick up the pace.

Okay, thanks for the advice. Basically we have a core 5-6 of us with full epic's from heroics, craftables, and pvp. The other "slackers" tend to have the occasional epic, but mainly blues. Basically about 50% of us outgear kara. I have read that the bear boss was attainable. I didn't really have any further ambitions with ZA until kara was completed.

Thanks.

Bear boss is absolutely doable by a group with Karazhan/heroics/crafted gear and some people in blues. We had our first kill on him with a tank wearing two greens. Last night we went there for our third time ever and managed to do the 20 minutes trial with 3 minutes left on the timer when the boss died.

Afterwards we went to have a look at the Eagle boss. Cleared the gauntlet on the third try. We didn't really know what to expect and without a paladin tank it was quite fun. Feral tank picked up the elites in front which then got focused by our dps. Birds got the AoE treatment while a protection warrior picked up the elite adds from behind and just kept collecting them Fankriss style and we killed them after the Tempest was dead. Got the boss to 25% within a few tries. Hint: if you get respawns before engaging the boss, just kill the Tempest. If you wipe now, you'll only have to clear a few elites and not the whole gauntlet.

So yeah, I'd suggest that you just give it a go. To get a feeling for the instance and to see something different than Karazhan every once in a while

Does this work if you don't kill all four? If you fail the time trial at some point do the captives you had saved previously, stay saved or do they all get sacraficed?

Yes they stay alive and you can release them at any time (unless the instance soft resets)

is the timed event bugged or intended to not give time after the 3rd boss?

and if it is is there a trick to the lynx boss or do we just not have enough dps to clear the 4 bosses in the time limit

Yeah it's just hard. Chain pulling with 0 deaths our best on the weekend was up to the Lynx as the timer ran out, we had 3 alts in s2 gear there though [no prot pally]. (And the other 7 in t5.5-t6)

We have finished the timed event 4 times now, each time doing better than the last. The last run we had 4-5 mins left as we killed Lynx. Yes, 4 - 5 mins. Granted people still pot up because they want to (I'm cheap :X), but I do think like Gurgthock says, this will get to the point where everyone will run it easily and people will see the timer as very forgiving, which I feel it is for the most part (barring wipes).

Yeah, my impression is that unless you brought the right CC classes, the pull before Nalorakk is actually much harder than he himself.

About the dragonhawk: I personally found him one of the easier bosses in there, and definitely the one with most interesting mechanics (maybe except for Zul'Jin - but I hate that guy and his stupid phase 3 - we wiped for two hours trying him on Sunday because we only had 1 rogue available). But I guess having a prot pally or not around makes a lot of difference between "this is fun!" and "this is quite annoying".

I found Dragonhawk to be the hardest boss on the first night, Zul'jin didn't take us half that many tries. As soon as everyone know what to do on Dragonhawk it doesn't seem that hard to execute. Zul'jin with only 2 healers turns into somewhat of a lottery tho.

Well I'm mostly overgeared for ZA but I still love it. The bossfights are clearly the best I've done ingame yet (though I still have yet to see BT/Hyal). They're fast, lots of action, pretty well balanced and the graphics are very nice IMO.

Only loot I'd want from the instance is some stuff from Zul'Jin, but I still enjoy doing the whole instance since I really like the athmosphere and the fast paced gameplay. Heroic badges are a nice bonus, too.

Karazhan was nowhere near as fun IMO. I think they did a great job on ZA and I hop they do more of this kind of stuff for 5/25-mans aswell.

Get to see two sides of this as I float between 2 communities.

A Kara/Gruul community has another zone where they can face challenges and bash their heads against content for hours slowly progressing.

A BT geared community has an ridiculously quick and easy source of badges, off spec items and possible upgrades for their remaining scrub items.

I really think Blizzard did a great job on Zul'Aman, they've catered to the casuals by making the instance relatively easy, and they've catered to the hardcore players by creating the timed event. I definitely look forward to seeing more of this dual purpose mentality in future instance designs.

As of last night we've cleared the timed event for the fifth time (even after I nubbed it up and died on Jan'alai) and we got our fifth bear mount. It's an intense 40-45 minutes that gets the blood flowing and I absolutely look forward to running it every 3 days.

We usually run with 1 Prot Pally, 1 Holy Pally, 2 Resto Shaman, 1 Elemental Shaman, 1 Destro Lock, 1 Rogue, 1 Fury Warrior, 1 Shadow Priest, 1 Prot Warrior. I do think our group could benefit from some changes, i'd personally like to cut out one of the prot tanks and bring in a feral druid or a good fury warrior (with excellent tanking gear) that can tank for trash/bosses that need two tanks and dps for the single tank encounters. But hey, what we do now works, so I won't complain =)

Do you always use protection paladins for those 4-5 min time remaining runs, or do you feel that reaching the time limit on a consistent basis is viable without having a protection paladin for the AoE pulls?

For Affliction and Shadow the big +DMG trinkets are actually better since such a large portion of your DPS comes from spell unaffected by the activation on the trinket.

Hex Shrunken Head + Icon of the Silver Crescent.

(Sorry for the slight derail!)

In a dreadawfull and depressing place instead of going into a light, bright and enjoyable instance with a 3 day reset-timer and some of the most enjoyable boss-fights in the game...

It's about the same if you run with equivalent groups.

13 badges in ZA takes just over an hour on a timed run for ~11-12 badges/hour
24 badges in Kara takes two hours with an equivalent group for ~12 badges/hour

Of course, ZA has more travel time per badge, but it also drops much better gear + a bear mount.

Our last clear we finished with 2.5 minutes remaining and did not run with a protection paladin. Our makeup was:

G1
Protection Warrior
Retribution Paladin
Feral Druid
Combat Swords Rogue
Beast Mastery Hunter

G2
Holy Paladin
Holy Priest
Restoration Druid
Destruction Warlock
Elemental Shaman

We were not perfect, we had a death or two along the way and additional time could have been saved. Overall I really like the event, and each time we do it we definitely get faster. On AoE pulls our retribution paladin would toss on tank gear and help to hold aggro, he would quickly swap back out for non-AoE pulls. The previous clear we were on pace to kill him with 2 minutes remaining but we had a bad mistake on lynx that put us just over the timer. For that clear we had a fury warrior instead of our retribution paladin. It can absolutely be done without a paladin tank.